I moved Calreth back to Antonia Bayle, and, in a desperate attempt to rekindle my dwindling interest in Everquest 2, joined up with a casual but population rich guild, Medieval Syndicate.

I’m usually not one to take my choice of guilds lightly, so this was a huge leap of faith for me; a last attempt to grasp at whatever Everquest 2 has left to offer. I’m hoping that, with the community that the guild has to offer, I’m able to find people to group with and participate in the game once again. Despite my reluctance, I recognize that the game is at a stage where, without the support of a guild or at the very least, a consistent group of players, an individual can’t get very far. When group members are needed, people usually go from friend list, to guild, and lastly, to the public channels. In the public channels, everyone is considered ‘pick up’ material, and groups have a nature aversion for pick-ups. No matter how good of a player I might be, I start off disadvantaged.

Many years after its release, Everquest 2 still remains a wonderful game. I hope it doesn’t come to a point where I’m forced to quit because the only thing I do during my precious few gaming hours are spent running around South Qeynos in circles and being the channel troll.

I find myself unable to game casually. For me, it’s all the way or not at all. Having being turned down from a few raiding guilds on Najena, I find it hard to swallow the feelings of rejection and turn to one of the more casual ones.

Being able to excel and achieve is an important goal for me, not just in a game, but anything else I do. This is the same reason that allows me to dedicate myself to one particular game and nothing else for years. I’d much rather succeed at one than be mediocre at a few. The sense of achievement and accomplishment are huge motivators in my gameplay. When the chances of them start diminishing, I find myself rapidly lose interesting in the game concerned.

What’s your playstyle?

Over the course of last weekend, I hit Lvl 90 and moved to the Najena server. Najena has a good fraction of population that are Australians, who has a rather similar timezone to mine. It’s about two to three hours ahead of me in Sydney, depending on if Daylight Savings Time is in effect. That was the motivating factor behind my move. I had hoped to be able to get groups on the nights that I do come home from base and perhaps even raid some.

Now that I’m over here on Najena, I’m disappointed and find myself regretting my move. The (low) frequency of groups hasn’t changed compared to being on Antonia Bayle. Despite there being a little more chatter in the channels during my evenings, I wasn’t getting into any groups at all. On the raiding front, although there are number of guilds that do carry out raids in the evenings, compared to zero on AB, none of them seems too keen on recruiting a Wizard. I’m stubborn though, and I love my class. I’ve been playing a Wizard since launch, and I’m not going to reroll to a class that is greater in demand. Logging in and staring at my screen for the next couple of hours depresses me.

I find myself in a bit of bind. I love the game, but I’m caught in a stagnant position and there doesn’t seem to be any way that I can improve my character. With groups being hard to find and raiding opportunities almost non-existent for me, I’m cut off from a good part of the game’s content. My passion for Everquest 2 only goes so far before I  start to question my next month’s subscription and source for other avenues of entertainment.

Has anyone noticed that the con system in Sentinel’s Fate is extremely unpredictable? There are some single ^ named mobs that have a ton of HP and are able to beat the crap out of me, such as the Forlorn Drake in Toxxulia Forest, despite me being able to solo a number of ^^ or ^^^ named heroics just fine. On the other hand, some of the Epic x4s in The Hole can be easily one-grouped, and there are even Epic x2s in some group instances.

Isn’t the whole point of the con system to provide a the player with a feedback of the estimated difficulty of the mob? While some over and under-cons are are typically the case, they don’t deviate too far from the expected margins. This is drastic.

I figured that since everyone would be busy questing away trying to level, I’d attempt to snag a few discoveries from tradeskilling. I was able to get most of the server-wide discoveries for the level 80 – 82 Provisioner crafts, making an adventure level in the process too from all the mobs I had to kill while harvesting. I had to leave for work then, and when I returned, I was twelve hours behind. All that can be discovered had been discovered by then.

That was when I started going through the adventure quests and exploring. The land mass is huge, and although I did enjoy the view offered while traveling on the NPC mounts from point to point initially, the long duration of the travel soon became rather irksome. I got annoyed, I got impatient. The disc-shaped mounts looked fantastic though, and riding on them reminded me of my Magus in Warhammer Online.

Taking the advise of the public, I found my way into a Hole group, where I experienced the fastest leveling I’ve ever done in EQ2. My group found a spot where large encounters of mobs constantly spawn, and with very little respawn time inbetween too. With full vitality and a 55% experience potion, I went from level 82 to 85 in about two hours. I finally understood the reason behind the significant amounts of level 90s I’ve seen in game barely a day after launch. There’s been much debate over whether the high amount of exp given by the group mobs in the Hole are intended  or a result of some mathematical formula gone wild. Either way, now that the game has already been launched in such a fashion, it’s too late to ponder over if which was the desired outcome but accept the situation as it is.

Asides from the whole international cd key fiasco, launch day went by very well. The server came up on time, and remained up. Performance was also good, despite the heavier load. I think the development and members of the IT team did a really good job with the load balancing and scaling.

I’m thankful that I didn’t have to experience any of the issues that the intentional player base is experience trying to obtain keys for Sentinel’s Fate, due to me winning a copy of the game from the trivia Stargrace held on Twitter yesterday. Hugs to you Stargrace, I’m eternally grateful.

In the history of EQ2 expansion launches, this one has to be the worst. The sites that SOE partnered with either didn’t accept orders from specific countries, or ran out of keys in the case of DLGamer (who also refused to accept Singapore purchases, btw). Worse still, DLGamer heavily oversold and accepted the money of players even though they did not have the products to back it up.  When Kiara visited the #EQ2 IRC channel on ZAM during the hours leading up to launch, she was faced with an anger mob of international gamers, who were out to lynch.

Despite me sharing many similar sentiments as the players who were not able to obtain the game, I felt that Kiara was being treated unfairly. Without her, it is possible that no international customer would have even been able to play on launch day itself. Rather, the responsibility for the whole fiasco lies with the invisible people in upper echelon of SOE’s management, the cold businessmen in suits. At the end of the day, the international community still constitutes a sizable force in the playerbase and there’s no reason to treat them as second-rate customers just because they do not live in North America.

I still have not quite figured out how I am going to obtain Sentinal’s Fate on launch day yet. Kiara mentioned over at the community forums that the marketing team has been working on allowing international customers to purchase Sentinal’s Fate digitally on launch day. The idea of delaying digital orders until a week after launch is a poor marketing decision, and flies against all logic. While most companies are looking to champion digital distribution as a means  for rapidly distributing their products without the messy and cumbersome logistical lines, implementing an artificial  delay seems to foolish.

I think SOE did realize that,  and made some noble efforts to amend that decision. However, at the time of this writing, none of the pre-order sites catered for international customers seem to be accepting orders from Singapore. DLGamer seemed to offer it, until I attempted to pay for it, and there wasn’t a single payment option listed for my country.

Sentinal’s Fate is still not listed on Steam yet. Hopefully it accepts my order there, otherwise it looks like I’m getting screwed. Sigh.

Race change potions have been added to the Station Marketplace in EQ2, and I was more than willingly to indulge myself in one. For quite sometime, I’ve been wanting to be an Erudite instead of a High Elf. I love the mysterious and alien look of the Erudite. It is as if in they’ve neglected their corporal form in the search of magic and the amount of power in them have twisted them into what looks like a twisted shriveled body, but one that contains pure power. In a way, it is like a cross between the Emperor from Star Wars and Voldemort from the Harry Potter series.

The potion can be bought for 2500 station cash, the same as what it takes for a character transfer. Some people however, are visibly upset with the race change potions. As Stargrace kindly pointed out to me, this would let someone be a Dark Elf Paladin easily instead of having to make a Shadowknight and betray it over, making some combinations of race and class easily obtainable without any effort.